Lieberman splinter group loses minor party status

Neil Vigdor

Updated 9:20 pm, Monday, January 7, 2013

Say it ain't so, Joe.

The eponymous minor party that Joe Lieberman used to win re-election to a final term in the Senate after he became estranged from his Democratic base has gone the way of the Bull Moose, Whig and A Connecticut parties -- to the political graveyard.

Connecticut for Lieberman is no more.

But not because Lieberman left his seat of 24 years last week.

Hijacked in recent years by Lieberman's critics, the vast majority of whom objected to his support of the U.S. war in Iraq, the splinter group had its minor party status stripped by the state after failing to field any candidates in the November election.

The state is still in the process of cleaning up its voter rolls, which showed 81 active enrollees in the party as of Friday.

A message seeking comment from Lieberman, who banded with his supporters in 2006 to create the party, but never joined it himself, was left Monday with an aide who has stayed on board with the former senator.

"Once a minor party loses its status as a minor party, all of those enrolled with a party that loses status become unaffiliated," Av Harris, a spokesman for the Secretary of the State's Office, wrote the newspaper in an email.

Minor parties are required to field at least one petition candidate, who, in turn, must garner at least 1 percent of the vote, for the group to be recognized by the state under its election laws.

"Only at that point do voters have the ability to enroll in that party," Harris wrote.

In Lieberman's final general election contest in 2006, the incumbent resorted to a third-party candidacy after Greenwich businessman Ned Lamont wrested the Democratic nomination from him.

The maneuver inflamed the political left, which regarded Lieberman as a foreign policy hawk whom President George W. Bush kissed on the cheek following the 2005 State of the Union address.

"That really was the last straw," Mertens said. "He just lost his way. He got so obsessed with invading Iraq that it changed him, and people wanted him out."

Lieberman critic John Orman, a Fairfield University political science professor who said Lieberman was allowed to abuse the third-party system, seized control of the party with some like-minded individuals. His takeover of the party went unchallenged by Lieberman and the group's founders.

Orman died in 2009.

Lieberman is not the first Connecticut politician to form his own political party.